Toxic fumes from rotting corpses has driven the final members of a Russian doomsday cult from the cave where they had been waiting six months for the end of the world, officials said.

Eight women and one man emerged from the muddy bunker outside a village in the region of Penza, 560km southeast of Moscow, said Tatyana Ostrovskaya, a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor's office.

"The last nine people came to the surface after the bodies of two women were found," Ostrovskaya said.

Interfax news agency quoted local official Vladimir Provotorov as saying that everyone left because there was "a real threat of poisoning from toxic corpse fumes" from two deceased cult members rotting in the cave.

"We could smell it through the ventilation shaft," he was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying. "When the specialists took out the dead hermits, we asked the others if they would like to leave, and they agreed."

The cultists were part of an ultra-Orthodox Christian splinter group, led by bearded guru Pyotr Kuznetsov, who reject the modern world and believe that bar codes on food products are a symbol of the devil.

In November, 35 members followed Kuznetsov's orders to take refuge in the frozen underground labyrinth as he predicted the world would end on Orthodox Easter Sunday, April 27.

More at the link

_________________

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman